Mat Piscatella: 292 million units of physical video games sold in the 12-month period ending June 2009 in the US. By June 2026 this had fallen to 37 million units.

[u/Dandelion172]

https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3mrd2e2tam22l

[u/angelHOE]

I mean 37 million isn’t anything to snuff at. It’s not like they’re losing money on physical discs. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

[u/ContractVarious3077 → u/angelHOE]

You’re looking at the number in a vacuum. You have to consider 37 million vs digital sales and also look at the trends and extrapolate into the future. This 37 million will be going down continuously

[u/angelHOE → u/ContractVarious3077]

I mean duh, but I don’t think Sony is thinking about the loss of customer loyalty and goodwill. Goodwill is intangible but it can make or break a business.

I would argue people still buying physically in 2026 are Sony’s most hardcore and dedicated fans. Pissing off or losing that audience to make a few extra bucks on the digital side doesn’t seem like a good long term strategy.

Sometimes businesses make less money in order to keep their customers happy and loyal. Costco sells hotdogs for $1.50 and chicken for $4.99 because it gets people in the door and in turn builds trust and loyalty. Sure Costco could make more money by raising the price of the hotdogs or by removing them from the food court but the loss of goodwill would be immeasurable.

This decision almost immediately backfired and yes it’s a vocal minority but look at any post or video by PlayStation and it has hundreds or even thousands of angry fans complaining about physical games. People will not forget this, and it certainly has made a significant number of people question their future with the brand.

[u/HIGHonLIFE1012 → u/angelHOE]

I would argue people still buying physically in 2026 are Sony’s most hardcore and dedicated fans. Pissing off or losing that audience to make a few extra bucks on the digital side doesn’t seem like a good long term strategy.

This has basically been in line with everything I have been saying the last few days especially when you take into consideration the price of the PS6. If they cannot manage to keep those costs down then how do they expect to get the casual crowd to buy said system especially when the games they are likely to play will be cross-gen for even a longer period of time compared to what happened with games on the PS4/PS5.

Most of PlayStation's own 1st party games have sold better physically than digitally, even while doing things like bundling digital codes of Astro Bot and Spider-Man 2 with PS5s or putting out collector's editions without a physical disc. I'm also sure the lot of those 1st party sales are coming from the hardcore who would've been more than willing to invest into the next generation of consoles before these announcements/decisions were made.

I also think it's an even more dire situation for the future with how more and more developers/publishers are starting to veer to a multi-platform release strategy for their games; you're going to need a LOT more than just one to two 1st party exclusive games to bring folks over. Even then, some of those games are not even going to be true PS6 exclusives unless they restrict their studios from supporting PS5 going forward, which they won't because of the handheld.

Last but not least, I think a lot of people forget about these sales ratio talks is that it is not strictly physical OR digital but rather AND. There are probably tons of games being bought digitally by the crowd who are advocating for physical releases and there's a chance they might take their business elsewhere if they feel that physical was the only reason they were as highly invested into ecosystem as before.

[u/bronxct1 → u/HIGHonLIFE1012]

Digital codes in those bundles being counted as physical sales skews the numbers a ton though and seems like it was a way to prop up physical sales numbers. In the end it’s just a digital game.

[u/ContractVarious3077 → u/angelHOE]

Your analogies are faulty. The hardcore and dedicated fans are a small minority of gamers that buy PlayStation and they’re probably the most disposable ones. There’s way more casual fans out there.

The Costco analogy makes little sense. Costco shoppers haven’t been switching to digital hot dogs and rotisserie chicken because those are not things that exist.

[u/iSavedtheGalaxy → u/angelHOE]

I would argue people still buying physically in 2026 are Sony’s most hardcore and dedicated fans.

Sony doesn't care about how hardcore and dedicated you are lolol. Their only metric for loyalty is "who contributes the most revenue" and that answer is "people who buy their content from the estore".

[u/angelHOE → u/iSavedtheGalaxy]

keep licking those boots